What Day Is Today? (The Answer Is Not Friday!)

Blog 23-2, January 27, 2023, Written By Jerry Elman

Today January 27th, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a date designated by the United Nations to commemorate Jews and other victims of the horrific crimes committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. The date marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As I highlighted in my previous blog, Auschwitz-Birkenau was the Nazi’s largest industrialized killing factory.

Today is a day for the world to pause, remember and educate itself about the Holocaust. But the reality is that, for the most part, the day will go by unnoticed by most people, even Jews.

Today may be mentioned in the media. Various organizations around the world may sponsor talks, seminars, and programs. But for most people worldwide, this day will be no different than any other day!

Time has made the Holocaust a distant period in the past. Ancient history to many! Those that survived the Holocaust have, for the most part, passed away. Soldiers that fought in WW II have also primarily passed away. The witnesses are gone. Most people alive today were born after WW II.

Those we have lost are no longer able to visit schools and faith communities to share their stories and bear personal witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.

As the next generation, we must continue telling their stories and sharing their lessons. We must send a clear message that not only will we not allow the world to forget, but we also will not allow Jews or others ever to be victims of this kind of hate and killing again!

Holocaust deniers are taking advantage of today’s circumstances. They argue the Holocaust never happened. They claim the numbers are highly exaggerated. They even dare to make the Jews the aggressors and everyone who killed Jews the victims. Jews today are often called Nazis and compared to Nazis. People say Hitler “did good things” for Germany and the world, even a former U.S. president!

There are the same old claims and tropes yet again! Jews control the banks, the financial system, and the media. We are “globalists” attempting to take control of the world! We even cause forest fires in California with our “Jewish lasers in space!” We are replacing “real Americans.”

It’s astonishing how after over 2,000 years of these same claims being made over and over again, we are once again seeing millions of people embracing and believing these myths. They believe that somehow today’s worldwide Jewish population of about 15 million has such control of a total world population of about 8 billion people. Today the number of Jews worldwide is still less than before WW II. We have not yet grown enough in 78 years to offset the 6 million lost in the Holocaust. At the same time, the world population has increased by almost 400 percent from about 2 billion people in 1945!

We cannot allow the world to forget the horrors of the Holocaust, the systematic, industrialized campaign to murder all of Europe’s Jews. The result was the death of six million Jews and millions of others, including LGBTQIA+, individuals with disabilities, priests, Poles, resistance fighters, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many more. Add in the armies and troops on both sides; about 75 million people died in WW II because of hate that was not challenged and stopped at the very beginning going back to 1933. It all started with the hate of Jews and then became much bigger than that!

As Jews, we must today make it clear that we are proud of being Jewish, and we will not tolerate antisemitic Jew-hating myths and bullshit from anyone! The haters must fear us as a force that will defeat them, not the other way around!

Holocaust deniers shout out their lies in mainstream places and media. Jews must actively call them out in the same mainstream places and media. They cannot be ignored! They must be discredited as fast as they speak.

In recent years, we have seen the spread of analogies to the Holocaust or Nazi Germany made in totally inappropriate and incorrect comparisons. This includes politicians on both sides of the aisle and individuals engaged in various political debates. COVID restrictions, masking requirements, and vaccination efforts became viewed as the same as Jews being forced to go to death camps. It is not only inappropriate and wrong, but it is also insulting to the memories of all who perished in the Holocaust. We must make it clear that this rhetoric is offensive and wrong and will not be tolerated, regardless of its source or the intentions of those who use it.

From the Nuremberg Laws to Kristallnacht to the forced round-ups of Jewish ghettos and, ultimately, the deportation of Jews to Nazi forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps across Europe, we must not only remember.

Just remembering is not enough. Remembering by itself is passive inaction. We must remember and act!

Elie Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor who spent the rest of his life hunting down Nazis for justice, stated: “I have learned that the Holocaust was a unique and uniquely Jewish event, albeit with universal implications. Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.” The Jews were victims and witnesses to the most deadly hate in all of history.

Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we must all raise our voices to affirm that hate will not be tolerated against anyone. Jews have never been hated alone. The people who hate Jews also hate others who are not like them. Throughout history, violence against Jews always extends to others. Today we see hate and violence against Jews, Blacks, Asian Americans, Muslims, Women, LGBTQIA+, Hispanics, and even Catholics. The war in Ukraine is all about hate. Ukraine has 600,000 Jews, the most in eastern Europe. Putin implies these Jews are the Nazis he is going after. And at the same time, he intends to destroy all Ukrainians. Once again, in today’s times, antisemitism is a threat to all!

All of us must step up to our responsibility to interrupt and disrupt antisemitism and all other forms of hate whenever and wherever we witness it. The stakes are too high to let it go! We must insist on respect and acceptance of all people. We must remember, and we must act! That is the lesson of the Holocaust.

Over the course of the day, remind people that today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Remind people of what the world faced in the 1930s and 1940s and how history will always repeat itself if we let it.